Supreme Court Strikes Down Injunction Preventing Government From Pressuring Big Tech to Suppress Free Speech | 26 June 2024 | The Supreme Court struck down a lower court's injunction preventing the federal government from pressuring Big Tech companies to suppress free speech in a pivotal ruling Wednesday. The court did not rule on the question of whether the government may pressure social media companies to suppress speech in a way that would be illegal for the government to do itself. Instead, the court ruled that the plaintiffs failed to establish Article III standing to bring the case. "We begin--and end--with standing," Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion for Murthy v. Missouri. Barrett delivered the majority opinion, in which Chief Justice John Roberts joined, along with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissenting opinion, in which Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined. Alito wrote that if the lower court's evidence is correct, "this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this court in years." He zeroed in on the case of Jill Hines, who he said was "indisputably injured" by the government's COVID-19 censorship campaign.

Subscribe to newsletter

Subscribe to the CLG newsletter. (We don't sell or share data.) Enter your email address below!